#48 — What Is Moral Progress?

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2016

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with philosopher Peter Singer about the foundations of morality, expanding the circle of our moral concern, politics, free speech, conspiracy thinking, Edward Snowden, the importance of intentions, WWII, euthanasia, eating “happy cows,” and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.7	Today I'll be speaking with Peter Singer. Peter is certainly one of the most famous living
0:52.1	philosophers. He's been very influential on public morality, both with respect to the treatment
0:58.3	of animals and in this growing movement that I spoke about with Will McCaskill on a previous podcast
1:04.8	known as Effective Alterism. He's a professor of bioethics at the University Center for Human
1:12.2	Values at Princeton. He's the author of many books, including Animal Liberation, which is often
1:19.6	considered the silent spring of the animal rights movement. He's also written The Life You Can Save
1:25.6	and the most good you can do and the ethics of what we eat and many other books. His most recent
1:30.9	book is Ethics in the Real World, 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter. And I highly recommend it.
1:38.2	Peter and I talk about many things and we ran out of time, frankly. We had two hours booked,
1:43.9	and as you'll hear at the end, I come up against the brick wall of time constraint and really
1:51.0	was wanting to talk about many more things. So I'll have to bring Peter back at some point.
1:55.4	We spend the first half hour or so talking about how it's possible to talk about moral truth.
2:03.0	And if that's not to your taste, if you're not really worried about how we can ground our
2:08.1	morality in universal truth claims, you might skip 30 minutes in or so where we start talking
2:16.0	about questions of practical ethics and we touch many things, the ethics of violence, politics,
	...

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